Abra

Let me just state the obvious, with no aspersions cast or intended: 1/8 cup = 2 Tablespoons. Easy to measure that way. Is anyone besides me using SAF Gold or a cloche?

Hopefully a real baker will step in here, but I think the folding and handling is not just voodoo. As the dough proofs and gluten develops, it's oriented, right? And folding and shaping tangles and re-orients the gluten strands, right? So the texture will be different if you just dump the dough straight into the pot, right? Or not? Oh, I see that Alana and I were posting at the same moment. Different explanation, same conclusion.

Wow, you rule, Dave. Eight months! Now that is patience. Beautiful.

My daube is in the oven now and will be all day. I'm making the Gascogne one from CSWF, and the quatre epices is giving the house an intriguing gingerbready smell. I'll chill it overnight, and then try to heat and chill again in the morning before a final heating and serving it for lunch. Full report to follow tomorrow.

Thank you, Mark - or should we call you Max? It's so good to have you join us! Can we talk about the wetness of the dough? Given that flours vary (even though a lot of us are using King Arthur AP, ambient humidity varies a lot regionally) was the 42% water mentioned in the article really what we should be shooting for? Because, assuming the calculations mentioned above are correct, that's 18 oz of flour, and that gives a dry dough. So, "a dough almost too wet to handle" is the target? I'm starting some more this afternoon, and I'll get it wetter, get some semolina in there, and take it to 210 instead of the 205 of my first loaf. I have an LC terrine pan, but given the amount of oven spring, I don't think it would be wise to put a whole batch in there. Maybe I'll make a recipe and a half, put half in the terrine and do the other half as a boule in my cloche. Actually, we are kind of science-y around here, many of us being true food geeks.

I did a lot of parfaits in my personal chef business because they serve so easily. My one caution is about fridge space - a tray or two of parfaits can really put your fridge out of commission. Some really nice ones I know are a coconut rice pudding parfait with fresh pineapple and macaroon crumbles, or key lime parfaits which are embarrassingly dead easy to do but people love them, and a tiramisu eggnog trifle that you can make as minis. None is exactly Thanksgivingy in a traditional sense, but they're all very good.

With my apologies for lighting, I would like to add this lurid update to the thread. Let me say that I've never seen nor tasted omurice, all I know about it is what I read. But tonight my leftovers cried out to become omurice, and there you have it. I had leftover rice that had been steamed with galangal and lemongrass. Leftover Korean-style ribs. A couple of eggs. Plenty of catsup. I fried the rice with scraps of the rib meat and catsup. Made the omelet with a splash of soy sauce in the eggs. Folded and squiggled. And you know what? We really liked it!

There's such a lot of good advice here that I'll only speak to the question of what to charge. As a person who sells her food skills and knowledge, I think of it like this. My time has a certain value to me. I have to earn a certain amount in a day to make it worth my while spending the day working, instead of whatever else I might be doing. We all hate getting to the end of a day tired and worn out, thinking about the compensation we received for our work, and feeling ripped off. Charge enough so that at the end of every working day you feel fairly paid and that it was a day well spent. The corollary to that is that the client wants to end the day feeling that the price paid was justified by the quality and quantity of the experience. There's no magic way to balance that equation, you just have to feel your way through it. For example, I see lots of Euro gastronomy courses that last 5-6 days and cost $4,000-5,000. For me that's a no-brainer. No way I'd spend that much money for that little time on cooking lessons and food tourism! But lots of people do, and they love it. Once you know who your target clientele is, you'll be able to better imagine how much they'd pay. Just using myself as an example, I'd pay you $250 for a day that included marketing, shopping in the markets, and hands-on preparation of a meal together. Once, for one day. But if I wanted something ongoing, as an expat might, like a 2 month series where you spent a day a week showing them all sorts of different food things and maybe had lunch together at some great little place, then I'd maybe want to pay no more than $750-1000 for 8 days. That's what I would charge if I were doing it here, just for what it's worth. And I wouldn't do a $250 day or a $1000 2 month thing for just one person, because then I wouldn't make enough. So I'd set a minimum number of people for a day. And I'd set a schedule so that people sign up to my calendar, instead of trying to book time willy nilly. But the business end is my worst skill, so you might want to take all that with a bit of flor de sal.

Of course, MB doesn't know me from Eve, so there's no guarantee he'll even consider it.

I sent Mark Bittman an email asking him to drop by this thread and chat with us about this technique. I don't think I've ever seen him on eG, but it would be great to get his input.

Having read about the "too wet" doughs, and trusting the 42% solution, I started with 18 oz of flour. I didn't have bread flour in the house, and used King Arthur all purpose. The dough was actually too dry (!) and I added a couple of tablespoons of water to get a moist, shaggy mass. Having worked with slack doughs a fair amount, I'd say this wasn't nearly as wet as a ciabatta would normally be. Based on comments here, I also upped the salt to 2 tsp of DC kosher. The only yeast I have right now is SAF Gold, which is an instant yeast formulated for sweet and fermented doughs. Although it's not what's called for, I figured it would work fine with the overnight ferment. My oven has a Proof setting, so I let the dough proof in that for about 8 hours, then turned off the oven for the night and left the dough to its own devices in the slightly warmed oven overnight. I was able to round the dough up onto a boule with no problem. The dough wasn't sticky or wet, just tender. I set it on floured parchment, since I couldn't see any reason to use a towel. I did cover it with a floured towel. It didn't rise much during the second rise period, maybe 25 - 30%. I baked it in my cloche, which I preheated at 450 for 45 minutes. I didn't soak the cloche. I got a beautiful oven spring, with the boule popping to an almost spherical shape. I baked it to an internal temperature of 205, when it sounded hollow as a drum. The crust was crunchy, rather than shattering, but it did sing as it cooled. Here's where we can see that the dough wasn't wet enough. While the texture is partly open, I would have liked bigger holes, and a more even distribution. I think that's all about the wetness - right? The crumb was elastic and moist. Oh, and some garlic roasted in duck fat goes really well with this bread! Overall, I'd say the bread was very good for the amount of work involved. I've made a number of breads with a 2-3 day ferment, and they have better flavor. But I think that Fromartz' suggestion to use a bit of old dough would solve that. I'd still like more salt, and will probably take it to 2 1/4 tsp next time, remembering that it's DC kosher I'm talking about, not table salt. I think a little semolina flour would also boost the flavor. So for me, next time will be a little wetter, a little saltier, and though I forgot to save dough to add next time, I will put in a touch of semolina flour. Fortunately, it makes a smallish loaf so I won't have to wait too long to try again.

Wow, those are some of the best pictures I've ever seen posted here! What a great trip, and I totally loved it when, after weeks of gorgeous food, you finally said you just weren't hungry. That was utterly hilarious. Now, if you'd said you couldn't manage even one more cocktail or one more glass of wine, I'd have know that the Cheese Robot had definitely brainwashed you!

This is such a fun blog, Divina! That olive oil was amazingly green - did they leave a lot of leaves in it for the pressing? The droghe sounds like quatre epices, only with six spices. Can you give us the proportions?

Lorna, try the Organic Valley dairy products. The cultured unsalted butter is my favorite, and the heavy whipping cream is sweet and delicious. And if you haven't yet found it - this goes for you too, Shal - you need to get Fage Total Greek yogurt at TJ's. The 0% fat is unbelievably delicious.

A Patric, that's a great idea to make sopressata for Christmas. I've been away from the thread for a bit - have you started yours already? I've never made it before, - got the beef middles a while ago so I could, then got distracted by summer. If you haven't already made yours, let's do it together. Cyber-together, that is.

Oh, I'm so glad I've waited to start my dough until someone else did the math - thanks, Merrybaker! Plus, I've heard and loved la musique du pain but I never knew the name for it. Wonderful. I'm going to start some now for baking tomorrow morning.

Klary, that happened to me once recently when I used low fat milk, but I've cooked the celery root and apples in whole milk several times without any curdling. Your duck breast looks fantastic! Bill, what a good idea. I'm always looking for a use for duck jelly. It wasn't too salty with a full cup? Mine is always sort of like demi-glace, really intense.

I'd like to hear more about the cooked wine marinade. Recently I read (but have spaced out on the source) that marinating in wine straight from the bottle toughens the outside of the meat and defeats the purpose, and that if you want wine flavors absorbed deep into the meat you need to cook off the alcohol first. Comments? I'm very attracted to the Daube in the Style of Gascony from CWSF, but I also like some elements of this Provencale version, especially the addition of orange peel and juniper berries. I've got everything I need to start the CWSF Gascogne version, to be ready on Tuesday, but I'm wondering about a) cooking the wine for the marinade, and b) adding some juniper and maybe a little orange. Would that be total heresy? I'm thinking it's all going in my Le Creuset Dutch oven, because it's a relatively massive amount of meat and bones and skin, and I don't have a clay pot big enough.

I wonder whether a tagine could substitute for the daubiere, since it too promotes condensation and minimizes evaporation. I have a luncheon next week, and if the weather continues stormy and cold like it is now, a daube would be the perfect thing.

Funny, I've never heard it called an oyster. I call it the scallop, and I thought everybody else did too. Where have I been all my life?

I've never parboiled banana leaves for tamales at all. I can only get frozen, but I don't see why you'd boil them. I just rinse them and pat them dry. I agree that feta is the best substitute for cotija, but I also think that a Dutch cheese like the Dorothea potato cheese, which tastes divine and melts beautifully, would be delicious in tamales.

Daniel, I don't have that book, but I have done lots of Mexican cooking. Just holler if you have questions.

Wow, cool! Given the choice between using my cloche and my Le Creuset, I wonder which would be better. In the video he emphasizes that the pan should be "blazing hot" which sounds more like the Le Creuset, unless you heat the cloche in the oven?

It was the combination of directions like "1/2 cup wine" with no suggestions about what kind of wine she had in mind, and "insert a sliver of garlic and a needle of rosemary" which is a silly waste of time. However, the result was outstandingly juicy and flavorful (and I didn't brine) so that speaks for itself. I'm going to try a couple more things from this book and see whether it grows on me.

I made the Garlic Roasted Pork Loin from Kafka's Roasting, and remembered why I stopped cooking from this book almost as soon as I started, years ago. Here it is, with apologies for the crummy photos. The light in my kitchen sucks now that it's dark at dinner. As it came out of the oven. She says you can roast potatoes in the pan with the meat. I did some celeriac and parsnip large dice instead. They turned into croutons, as you can see, but they were tasty croutons. She also wants you to sliver up some garlic and slice zillions of tiny cuts in the meat, inserting a garlic sliver and one NEEDLE of rosemary into each cut. Uh, no thanks. That's the sort of instruction that turned me off the book originally. But now I'm a much more experienced cook and can improvise freely without changing the character of the recipe. What I did was to chop up a bunch of rosemary with the garlic and a little olive oil, then pierce the meat with a metal skewer a couple of times, then stuff the herb paste into those holes. Now let me say that on the plate with a celery root and apple puree, the parsnip and celery root croutons, and some apples and onions glazed with a little Tupelo honey and tossed with fresh sage, drizzled with the wine pan sauce she recommends, it was total heaven. Oh yeah, she calls for "wine." Not white wine, red wine, or any sort of specific wine, which is another of the things that used to drive me crazy. I used a pinot gris because I didn't have a Riesling, which is what I really wanted to use. My husband gave it the ultimate compliment when he said "those nights when I say I don't know what I want for dinner, what I really mean is, I want this!"